Old Man Rhythm a-gits-a in my shoes
It ain’t no use just a-singin’ the blues
Be my guest, you got nothing to lose
Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise!

Going on a sea cruise with Jerry Lee Lewis these days would be mildly amusing. He’s 73 years old and isn’t likely to get you into too much trouble on board. Sailing away with him in the 1950s and ’60s would probably have been outright dangerous.

But this is 1932 and Jerry Lee hasn’t been born yet, so we can safely check out the ropes, as it were. These items from Canadian Pacific are menu cards — you can tell because there are seagulls on them, and seagulls are indigenous to restaurants, especially but not necessarily floating ones.

It’s late August near the end of a fine summer in Britain, and we’re sailing from Liverpool to Quebec City and then Montreal aboard the 20,000-ton steamship Duchess of York, with calls in Belfast and Greenock to pick up potatoes and Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s promising to do his “King of the World” stunt off the bow.

Our skipper is RN Stuart, VC, DSO, RNR, but mealtime goes far beyond alphabet soup. That Mignon of Pork with Pineapple Mikado sounds quite fetching.

Commander Stuart’s telling his war stories between courses. His mum was the daughter of an Australian master mariner and his dad grew up on Prince Edward Island, and certainly knew his way around a boat too. So it was a kick in the head in 1914 when young Ronald Niel got stuck on a beat-up old destroyer, the HMS Opossum, doing harbour patrols. At one point he actually begged to get tossed to the army instead. There’s more!

More from The Box of Old Stuff, a comic painting by one William Grote, “Courtesy Life Pub. Co.” and evidently given away to to good customers of a toothpaste once famous in Britain and North America, Forhan’s for the Gums.

I spent quite a while in the Google library trying to track down Grote and the origins of this particular drawing. Forhan artefacts are everywhere — millions of people are selling the company’s magazine and newspaper ads from the 1920s and even earlier, for anywhere from $4 to $16.

These ads are pretty funny to modern eyes, though they do have a strange resonance in the US Homeland Security alerts. Four out of five readers were warned that horrible gum disease was poised to strike unless they scrubbed their teeth with RH Forhan’s miracle cream.

There was no sign of either Grote or his “Painless Dentist” cartoon until I isolated the search to “Liar”, and finally found them both on eBay — the artwork taking the form of a tin sign, no less, and on offer for $2.99. There’s more!

This ticket could still be valid, and when a fish dinner is on offer for only $1.75, how can you go wrong?

Dug out of The Box of Old Stuff and yours for any half-assed bid at all, it’s a passport to adventure in the form of the Essex County Sportsmen’s Association October 1946 catch-of-the-day dinner at the golf club in Leamington, Ontario, Canada.

You know the fish are going to be fresh, and while you’re pulling the bones out of your gums you get free entertainment, including Moving Pictures (we call them films now, unless they’re actually quite gripping emotionally) and a chance to win a bag of shells, presumably seashells.

As a bonus, here’s another admission ticket, this time to a dance being held in less than two years! It’s the Leamington Business and Professional Women’s Club dance down on Wigle Street. The price is a very reasonable $2.50 per couple — and you don’t have to wear any clothes!

No wonder it doesn’t start ’til 10. Pretty kinky stuff for the 1940s.

It’s been five long years now since the Rolling Stones left me holding the bag in Bangkok and I haven’t heard a word of apology from them. Keith’s got magnums of time to make pirate movies, and I see that Mick is lately dragging his granddaughter around other people’s shows in London, which makes for some pretty horrifying pictures in the press.

The above “souvenir” card was one of thousands distributed in Bangkok ahead of what would have been the band’s first concert in Thailand, on April 10, 2003 (even though the card says April 8 — an early slip-up forecasting trouble).

History has lumped that show’s cancellation in with a string of others and tagged it with the SARS excuse — the sub-pandemic of November 2002 to July 2003 that killed 774 people, mostly in Hong Kong. That was indeed the reason given for the Stones making a detour around Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, but that’s not why they backed off Bangkok.

Officially, at least — who knows what might actually have happened? — the band had roared across Australia and played Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Singapore, Bangalore and Mumbai and were ready for Thailand next when their roadies’ airplane was grounded in Mumbai on April 9 “due to a technical problem”. No sound, lighting or stage crew could get airborne.

And that is supposedly why 11,000 people holding tickets to get them into Impact Arena in Muang Thong Thai in Bangkok’s north end didn’t get licked by the Rolling Stones on their “Licks” world tour. There’s more!

You think marketing companies these days are pretty slick. This envelope from 1914, dug out of The Box of Old Stuff, features a picture of a one-pound can of Magic Baking Powder on the front, and on the back — now here’s the sneaky part — what appears to be a handwritten postscript from whoever sent you the letter.

It reads, “Forgot to say that we find Magic Baking Powder is O.K. It is different to most, as it does not contain Alum.” It’s printed on there, of course.

I was shaking my brain trying to recall what the hell was wrong with alum. Wikipedia tells me they used it in skin whiteners in Shakespeare’s time and as a hair stiffener in the 1950s, and it’s still used in hair-removing wax in the Middle East, as a deodorant in many parts of the world including Thailand (sahn-som!), to stop shaving cuts from bleeding, as a home remedy for pain and canker sores, for fireproofing paper and — here we go — in pickling veggies and keeping them crisp.

Another website says potassium aluminum sulfate, also known as potash alum, and sodium aluminum sulfate, which is the one in baking powder that gives a vague metallic taste, are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as a food additive, but if you swallow an ounce or more it’s toxic, so its use is discouraged. And yet another site points the finger at calcium aluminum phosphate — “now being phased out, owing to current beliefs that aluminum may be bad for us at much lower levels than was previously known”.

Regardless of the enemy’s name, yet again, advertising saves lives.

Magic Baking Powder is the brand now owned by Kraft that’s made and sold in Canada, where the envelope originated, but by the time the EW Gillett Company started producing it in Toronto in 1897, commercial baking powder for quickly leavening batter had already been around for half a century.

Its invention is credited to Justus von Liebig in 1835, as a blend of baking soda, cream of tartar and starch and marketed as Royal Baking Powder. Eight years later British chemist Alfred Bird’s wife was allergic to eggs and yeast so he “improved” baking powder for her and ended up selling warehouses of the stuff to the army.

In the 1850s the cream of tartar was swapped for slower-acting calcium aluminum phosphate, and then in 1885, sodium aluminium sulphate was discovered, and it waited to react until the dough was actually in the oven. Calumet Baking Powder became America’s choice in 1889, but today the favourite there is the quaintly named Clabber Girl Baking Powder, a brand that’s also more than a century old.